Usage

To use the fmt library, add :file:format.h and :file:format.cc from a release archive <https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt/releases/latest>_ or the Git repository <https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt>_ to your project. Alternatively, you can :ref:build the library with CMake <building>.

If you are using Visual C++ with precompiled headers, you might need to add the line ::

#include "stdafx.h"

before other includes in :file:format.cc.

.. _building:

Building the library

The included CMake build script__ can be used to build the fmt library on a wide range of platforms. CMake is freely available for download from http://www.cmake.org/download/.

__ https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt/blob/master/CMakeLists.txt

CMake works by generating native makefiles or project files that can be used in the compiler environment of your choice. The typical workflow starts with::

mkdir build # Create a directory to hold the build output. cd build cmake <path/to/fmt> # Generate native build scripts.

where :file:{<path/to/fmt>} is a path to the fmt repository.

If you are on a *nix system, you should now see a Makefile in the current directory. Now you can build the library by running :command:make.

Once the library has been built you can invoke :command:make test to run the tests.

You can control generation of the make test target with the FMT_TEST CMake option. This can be useful if you include fmt as a subdirectory in your project but don't want to add fmt's tests to your test target.

If you use Windows and have Visual Studio installed, a :file:FORMAT.sln file and several :file:.vcproj files will be created. You can then build them using Visual Studio or msbuild.

On Mac OS X with Xcode installed, an :file:.xcodeproj file will be generated.

To build a shared library__ set the BUILD_SHARED_LIBS CMake variable to TRUE::

cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=TRUE ...

__ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_%28computing%29#Shared_libraries

Header-only usage with CMake

You can add the fmt library directory into your project and include it in your CMakeLists.txt file::

add_subdirectory(fmt)

add_subdirectory(fmt EXCLUDE_FROM_ALL)

to exclude it from make, make all, or cmake --build ..

Settting up your target to use a header-only version of fmt is equaly easy::

target_link_libraries(<your-target> PRIVATE fmt-header-only)

Building the documentation

To build the documentation you need the following software installed on your system:

Python <https://www.python.org/>_ with pip and virtualenv
Doxygen <http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/>_
Less <http://lesscss.org/>_ with less-plugin-clean-css. Ubuntu doesn't package the clean-css plugin so you should use npm instead of apt to install both less and the plugin::

sudo npm install -g less less-plugin-clean-css.

First generate makefiles or project files using CMake as described in the previous section. Then compile the doc target/project, for example::

make doc

This will generate the HTML documentation in doc/html.

Android NDK

fmt provides Android.mk file__ that can be used to build the library with Android NDK <https://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/ndk/index.html>. For an example of using fmt with Android NDK, see the android-ndk-example <https://github.com/fmtlib/android-ndk-example> repository.

__ https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt/blob/master/Android.mk

Homebrew

fmt can be installed on OS X using Homebrew <http://brew.sh/>_::

brew install fmt